1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, there have been image forming apparatuses (printers) which output a large amount of same images mainly for commercial and industrial use. The image forming apparatuses are required to speed up the output and control operations to maintain high image quality.
Accordingly, the output of the plurality of images which are the output targets is interrupted by test images to perform detection and correction of image quality as needed in parallel with the image formation. At this time, image data on which image processing after the correction was performed is held and directly used for the image formation, and thus, it is not necessary to form images after performing the correction to the original image data every time, and the image formation can be performed fast with low load.
However, image data is used not only for a single image forming apparatus, but also for other image forming apparatuses and for data output and display output without performing image formation. In such case, when the original image is replaced with the image to which image processing was performed and the image is stored, problems occur in a case where the image is output to other than the image forming apparatus. Thus, Japanese Patent Application Laid Open Publication No. 2007-181118 describes a technique which can selectively determine which of the image after image processing and the image before image processing is to be stored.
However, in image formation for industrial use, an image which is the image formation target is repeatedly output to continuous recording medium (continuous form paper) a plurality of times and necessary parts are cut out. In such case, a plurality of images are normally formed at small intervals so as to eliminate waste of recording medium. As a result, image data is output to the printer engine at small intervals, and the conventional configurations have a problem that high speed image formation is obstructed even if data for correction is acquired since there is no sufficient time to reflect and output the corrected data as a parameter for image processing according to the image formation at small intervals.